A 6-3 U.S. Supreme Court decision strikes down a federal appeals court ruling saying that UPS didn't discriminate against a pregnant woman by failing to give her light duty work. Ever lift packages for UPS? Then you know a pregnant woman is really putting herself in danger by doing it. Naturally, the Court's decision is fairly narrow and technical, merely ruling that the federal appeals court didn't let the plaintiff make her case. But UPS has already changed its rule on this matter, so I'll call that victory.
Gov. Mike Pence signs "religious freedom" bill allowing businesses in Indiana to discriminate against gays and anyone else they don't like as long as they can use their "religious beliefs" as an excuse. That came not long after the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) declared (as GenCon did) that it would strongly consider pulling its annual meeting out of Indiana if the governor had signed the bill -- and not long before billion-dollar cloud computing corporation Salesforce declared it would "cancel() all programs that require our customers/employees to travel to Indiana to face discrimination." Maybe what the business community wants won't register with the nominally-Republican Mr. Pence after all.
Ho hum, three "progressive" Democrats join together to sell the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade deal to Teh Librulz. And they're peddling the same swill -- we better take this agreement or we'll have no say over trade, as if rejecting this agreement somehow isn't a way of having a "say" over trade. And fast-tracking these bills defeats the purpose of "having a say" in trade matters, since you have less of a say when you don't amend a bill or limit debate on it. On the plus side, I suppose: former Gov. Gregoire sounds like she's totally phoning in her fast-track support.
I guess it's mildly noteworthy that Sen. Ted Cruz has slammed the "special favors" in the form of "subsidies and special benefits" that big Wall Street corporations "seek out and get" from our federal government, and not because his wife worked at Goldman-Sachs until a few days ago. Pretty much anyone could have predicted that Republicans could put on the robes of populism as easily as Democrats could, but as always, I don't see very much action from Ted Cruz on matters such as these. Did he shut down the government over untrammeled Wall Street power? No, he shut it down over Obamacare, which he just signed up for, by the way.
Finally, the Consumerist plays "Where Are They Now?" with your favorite 1990s websites, like AOL, Geocities, anad AltaVista. Out of all the big '90s players, only Yahoo! (still a good news aggregator) still stands in anything like its original form, though AOL's sheer persistence is to be admired, I suppose -- though AltaVista (my search engine of choice until Google outdid it) or Netscape (which I used all the way into the middle of 2001, and whose soul exists in Firefox, my web brower of choice today) deserve more admiration, certainly. Maybe Geocities, too, which I always found hard to load in the '90s and I'm pretty sure that was my loss.
Comments